Yes
Cited passages
Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to his disciples, “Sit here, while I go there and pray.” He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and severely troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here, and watch with me.” He went forward a little, fell on his face, and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass away from me; nevertheless, not what I desire, but what you desire.” He came to the disciples, and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “What, couldn’t you watch with me for one hour? Watch and pray, that you don’t enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Again, a second time he went away, and prayed, saying, “My Father, if this cup can’t pass away from me unless I drink it, your desire be done.”
He went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass away from him. He said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Please remove this cup from me. However, not what I desire, but what you desire.”
He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s throw, and he knelt down and prayed, saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The Gethsemane prayer is among the most revealing divergences between the Synoptic and Johannine portraits of Jesus, and the divergence is not incidental — it is structural to each Gospel's Christology. The Synoptic Jesus enters Gethsemane in genuine, escalating dread. Mark 14:33 deploys the strongest distress vocabulary in the whole Gospel: *ekthambeisthai* (to be utterly astonished, struck with horror) paired with *adēmonein* (to be in anguish), and v. 34 has Jesus declare his soul 'sorrowful unto death' (*perilypos … heōs thanatou*), language echoing Psalm 42:5-6. He falls to the ground and prays that 'the hour might pass from him' (Mark 14:35), then voices the cup-petition directly: 'Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me' (14:36). Matthew 26:39 conditions the request — 'if it be possible' — and Luke 22:42 'if thou be willing,' but in all three the prayer for deliverance is sincerely offered before the submission clause caps it. Luke heightens the agony further with the angel and the sweat 'as great drops of blood' (22:43-44), though those two verses are text-critically insecure: they are absent from P75, Sinaiticus' original hand, Vaticanus, and A, marked with obeli in other witnesses, and NA28 brackets them as a probable later expansion (see Ehrman and Plunkett's argument that they were added to counter docetism). Whatever their pedigree, they confirm the trajectory of the Synoptic tradition: a Jesus whose humanity recoils from the cross.
John has no Gethsemane scene whatsoever. The entire 'troubled soul' moment is compressed into John 12:27, set not in a garden on the night of arrest but in public during the final week: 'Now is my soul troubled (*tetaraktai*); and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour.' The petition for deliverance is raised only to be discarded in the same breath. Raymond Brown's *Death of the Messiah* offers the definitive analysis: John has deliberately reworked the agony tradition because Johannine Christology cannot tolerate a Jesus who genuinely seeks escape. The Fourth Gospel's Jesus lays down his life of his own authority — 'no man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself' (John 10:18) — and in the arrest scene he, not his captors, controls events. C. H. Dodd traced the way John transmuted the inherited agony material into a moment of sovereign resolve; Bultmann and Käsemann read the omission as theological editing, Käsemann famously arguing that John's Jesus 'strides over the earth as a god.'
The strongest harmonizing case, defended by Carson and Köstenberger, treats John 12:27 and Gethsemane as two distinct, both-historical episodes: an earlier moment of inner conflict that Jesus resolved days before, and a later garden prayer in which he wrestled afresh. As narrative reconstruction this is not impossible — the Gospels are demonstrably selective, and John omits much the Synoptics include. But it founders on the emotional and theological *content*, not merely the chronology. The Synoptic Gethsemane Jesus genuinely entertains the petition — 'if it be possible, let this cup pass' is a live request held open until submission overrides it. The Johannine Jesus poses 'shall I say, Father, save me?' as a rhetorical non-starter, answered before it is finished: 'but for this cause came I unto this hour.' One Jesus asks and waits; the other refuses to ask. These are not two stages of a single psychology resolving over time; they are two different Christological postures toward the passion. Ehrman in *How Jesus Became God* uses precisely this contrast as a model of the Synoptic-to-Johannine developmental arc: as Christology climbs, the marks of human frailty are progressively effaced. The choice is between two prayer-events with incompatible emotional logic or one tradition reshaped by Johannine theology — and the latter is the more economical reading.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction reflecting divergent Christologies.
Sources for this reading